Ready, Jet, Quench: Jets in the Early Nonequilibrium Stages of Heavy-Ion Collisions

by Florian Lindenbauer (MIT Center for Theoretical Physics – a Leinweber Institute)

Thursday 27 Aug 2026, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Helsinki

One of the central open questions in heavy-ion collisions is how the initially far-from-equilibrium plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons evolves toward local thermal equilibrium. This process, known as hydrodynamization, can be simulated with an effective kinetic description of QCD, but experimental evidence has remained elusive. Hard probes, such as jets, produced at very early times, offer a promising window into these early-time dynamics. In this talk, I will present results for how an energetic parton traversing the quark-gluon plasma broadens, emits gluons and loses energy. I will also link the resulting radiation pattern to the underlying (bottom-up) equilibration process of the plasma, which consists of under- and overoccupied stages, and discuss how this can be interpreted as the emergence of a limiting attractor.

2026-08_Jyväskylä_Lindenbauer.pdf